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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid and Veeam Tag Team for Backup Storage Speed and Reliability

Customer Overview

The mission of Hamilton County DD Services is to promote and support opportunities for people with developmental disabilities to live, work, learn and fully participate in their communities. They are  building a new legacy of including and integrating people with disabilities in all aspects of community life. Hamilton County is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Key Benefits:

  • ‘Tag-team solution’ of ExaGrid and Veeam provides fast backups plus efficient data storage
  • Backup window reduced from full day to four hours;
  • Exchange backup cut from 20 hours down to two
  • ‘Piece of cake’ installation; ExaGrid-Veeam setup done in less than a day
  • System delivers key advantages of both speed and reliability
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Job Fails and Virtualization Force Elimination of Tape

Hamilton County implemented many variations of their backup storage solution until they realized things were not improving. According to Brian Knight, Director of IT, “We used some tape and also had two Veritas Backup Exec appliances that were doing daily backups to tape, which is only so good. You literally store them on a shelf and just hope that seven years later, if you ever need them, the backups are OK. We frequently had backup jobs fail, and storage was always a problem as were the backup devices themselves. We had to physically replace them at least three different times within just a three-year span.”

Today, Hamilton County operates its systems in a virtualized Veeam environment. “We selected ExaGrid with Veeam to perform backup because it’s a tag-team solution. I was tired of previous devices and was ready to literally throw them out,” said Knight.

"ExaGrid was one of those things that seems ‘too easy.’ You set it up in a single day and realize it was a piece of cake! ExaGrid and Veeam – they just work. "

Brian Knight, Director of IT

Complicated Backup Management Strains Resources

According to Knight, backups typically took multiple days to finish. “Essentially, backup would occur in pieces. We could only run backup once every week because it took too long. Some of our databases are fairly large and would take almost a day – or even longer – to complete.

“Backup Exec didn’t work well with daisy-chaining the jobs. Each time, I hoped that the jobs weren’t getting in the way of the resources because they could only handle one job at a time. A full backup of our Exchange server used to take somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours to complete in the past but now takes just two hours. I can have a whole night’s backup of all my systems done in about four and a half hours – I never knew that was even possible prior to ExaGrid!“

Data Deduplication Impact

ExaGrid’s approach to data deduplication reduces the amount of data stored, boosting retention while ensuring fast backups. Essentially, what Hamilton County couldn’t do with Backup Exec, they can do with Veeam. “If we have to recover anything out of the Veeam environment – backups or even a physical server – I can retrieve it from the ExaGrid system without having to store it somewhere else,” said Knight. “Restores are quick and easy.”

Retention requirements are a difficult balance for any business but in healthcare, some files and data need to be kept forever. “Most regulatory requirements are typically in the range of seven years, and that’s usually for federal regulations since we deal with Medicare and Medicaid,” said Knight.

Seamless Installation and Service Translate into Peace of Mind

The ExaGrid/Veeam setup was seamless. “We had a joint ExaGrid-Veeam team in the server room who got the system set up for us in just one day and ensured everything was communicating correctly,” said Knight. “It was a piece of cake!”

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery).

“Installation was quick and easy, and we haven’t really had any support issues, said Knight. “At one point, my ExaGrid engineer noticed that the system wasn’t reporting in. He reached out to me, figured out what the issue was, and fixed it. I get alerts every day but, frankly, it’s one of those things that just runs. Before ExaGrid, I was dealing with backup failures almost nightly – either a tape ran out or the backup job agent in Backup Exec failed, or something to that effect. Rarely did I go through a night when I didn’t have to go back and troubleshoot.”

Reliability is Key

According to Knight, reliability was pivotal to Hamilton County’s decision to implement ExaGrid with Veeam. “Speed is nice but if it’s not reliable, then it’s not helpful. Knowing that your system is going to work – and that it’s going to work within a reasonable amount of time – are two key things that any person who runs backups will appreciate,” he said.

ExaGrid and Veeam

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.

ExaGrid-Veeam Combined Dedupe

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

Unique Architecture

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores.

ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

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